Wearing your watch the right way has several factors including the tightness of your watch around the wrist. Having a watch requires you to, at least once change the tightness on your wrist, to adjust it to your personal liking. How tight a watch should be is a question that everyone needs to get right and that’s why we answered it here.
The tightness of a watch around your wrist is always a personal preference. As a general rule, if you can keep a tight pinky between the watch and your wrist, your watch will fit perfectly. Make sure the pinky doesn’t have a lot of room and make sure you don’t have any marks when you take off your watch.
Now, the general rule is great to know but after knowing this, there are a few extra steps you can take to make sure your watch fits perfectly.
Why should your watch be this tight:
Wearing a watch should be convenient. It should also not fit too tight, and it shouldn’t be too loose. Let’s find out why we take this as a general rule.
The first rule when wearing a watch around your wrist is to not wear it too tight, which is the most important one. Keeping a watch too tight can even hurt your wrist and can leave marks when pulling it off after a long day.
Make sure the timepiece stays on top of your wrist and cannot rotate around your wrist. You have to be able to slide a watch about 2 cm back, then it fits just right. You see plenty of people wearing the watch more loosely than the recommended rule we gave, and that’s a good thing too.
So, how do we wear it then? A perfect watch fit doesn’t slide around on your wrist. It shouldn’t be too tight, but it shouldn’t be too loose either. These are cliche answers of course, but it’s really about personal preference, just make sure your watch isn’t too tight.
This is why we use the most general rule so you will always be right, we see the pinky rule as the perfect fit.
How to change the tightness of your watch:
Now that we know how tight the watch should be on your wrist, it is very useful to know how we can actually realize it. This changes per watch strap. A watch strap that consists of 1 full strap, without pieces in between, such as leather, plastic, or textile straps, can be changed by the holes in the band.
It can also be changed by making the holes in the band yourself. Make sure you know how loose the watch should be first, before making a hole in your watch.
To get this process right, it’s always helpful to watch a video to get this process perfect. A simple way to make a new hole in your watch is perfectly explained in the following post, or in the following video:
Changing a watch strap is slightly different if you wear a metal watch because you change the band differently, namely by cutting out some of the links instead of just keeping a whole band and adding a gap.
A metal watch strap could consist of a folded link, pushpin, or screw-in style strap. To resize your watch you need the following items:
- Watch strap shorten
- Pliers (from your fingers)
- Cleaning cloth
- Small hammer
First, assess how many links you want to remove to comply with our general rule. Look closely at the arrows to determine where you should use the watch strap shorter, and use the hammer and watch strap shorter to take the links apart. This process is perfectly explained in the following video:
The tightness of your watch could change:
If you could look at your wrist around the entire day, it won’t look the same all the time. The fact is that your wrist size changes throughout the day. And therefore, your watch won’t always fit the same throughout the day. It could be that in the morning it’s looser than in the afternoon, and that’s normal.
This is normal because there are several factors that can influence the size of your wrist throughout the day. Examples of factors may include:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Degree of physical exertion
It is for example very normal that a watch expands way more if you’re wearing it in warm weather. Resizing your watch during warm days could be an option and doesn’t mean you need to resize it for the long run.
What happens within your body throughout the day is that your body needs blood circulation, and this changes while standing, sleeping, and with relaxation and stress. And this process is really normal. If you experience a lot of moments throughout the day of tightness and marks after putting your watch off, it’s probably time to think about a resize of your watch.
How do you keep a watch from sliding:
It could also be the other way around. Due to the warm weather or because you often perspire quickly, you may often sweat during the day. This seems to happen mostly when wearing a leather strapped watch. So how do you stop your wrist from perspiring under your watch?
You can stop sweating under a watch by increasing air circulation. You do this by choosing the right materials. Metal straps, silicone straps, or perforated leather straps, for example, are way better for air circulation under the watch and will decrease perspiring.
The leather absorbs the heat from your body, which is then reflected back on you. This will cause the leather to become warmer than other materials. This causes your skin to expand and start to perspire. It can be very disadvantageous if the weather is already warm and you have a leather watch. It can cause your watch to slide on your wrist all the time and can cause damage to your watch strap over time.
Should a watch rather be too tight or too loose:
You often see people wearing a watch very loose. As we mentioned before, it is very much up to the person and personal preference to determine how tight a watch should be. The only thing we can say is that it is probably a lot better for you to wear your watch too loose. Wearing your watch too tight can cause a lack of circulation and physical torment that can cause pain.
The watch will also thank you when wearing your watch a little bid more loose. there is more pressure on the pushpin, which connects the watch to the watch case. This can mean that your watch is likely to require maintenance sooner.
The conclusion is that there are several factors that can determine how tight your watch should be. Keeping our general rule will make it fit perfectly and keep you from having trouble with the watch and with your own wrist. After all, keeping your watch too loose is possible but will probably look a bit sloppy. Do not keep your watch too tight as it can cause problems for your watch and yourself.
For more information and facts about watches, you can always check out our watches category, which contains all your questions about watches. For example, if you’d like, check out the following article about how a watch keeps track of time here.
